Background
Fairless was born at Hexham, Northumberland, one of the sons of the antiquary Joseph Fairless.
Fairless was born at Hexham, Northumberland, one of the sons of the antiquary Joseph Fairless.
He was a student of the vignette engravings of Thomas Bewick, and for some time worked under Bewick"s pupil Isaac Nicholson, a wood-engraver at Newcastle. Nicholson went to London and became a landscape-painting, typically of summer scenes in English woods and pastures of England, and sea-views and shipping. From 1848 to 1851 he was an exhibitor at the Royal Academy, the British Institution, and the Suffolk Street Gallery.
He was also a teacher of drawing and painting.
In August 1851 Nicholson returned in bad health to Hexham, where he died on 14 July 1853, in his twenty-eighth year.